In February 2025, Andrej Karpathy coined “vibe coding”: describe what you want, let AI write the code, forget the code exists. It caught fire. Everyone wanted to believe coding had become as easy as talking.

One year later, Karpathy renamed it. The new term: “agentic engineering.” His explanation was pointed. “‘Engineering’ to emphasize that there is an art and science and expertise to it.” He’d gone from 80% manual coding to 80% agent coding in weeks, and discovered the hard way that models are “jagged” — brilliant at hard problems, then tripping over the obvious.

The data backs him up. GitClear’s 2025 code quality study found that AI-coauthored pull requests have 1.7x more issues than human-only PRs. Copy-pasted code lines rose from 8.3% to 12.3% between 2021 and 2024. Meanwhile, AI now writes 41% of all code on GitHub, with 4.7 million paid Copilot subscribers. — Read More